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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8620590" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I think the issue can be more of when one becomes too alien for people to engage with than absurd per se.  At that point, while it might be possible to do it in a simulationist sort of way, I suspect the posture the game takes is the least of anyone's concern in that case.This, in a way, mirrors a perennial argument that took place back in r.g.f.a.: are the postures fundamentally incompatible?  I never thought they were, but that there were absolutely tradeoffs as you pursued one over the others, and if you heavily pursued two, you were going to more and more squeeze the third out.But of course I also think you never see just one in the wild; you have games that strongly chase one, but they don't end up entirely excluding the others.I think usually with gamism the tension is much greater between keeping it engaging on a game level and easy to manage at the same time; there are obviously different sweet spots that work for different people, but the people who find really simple games engaging, if you dig into it, do so because they've moved all the engagement up to a non-mechanical level (sometimes in other elements, sometimes (as in OD&D) up to a kind of freeform sort of of parallel game).  I think there's a distinct drop-off at each end with how much people find really simple or really complex games engaging on that level, which is why really complex RPGs are relatively rare, and to the degree they're successful, really simple games are either doing what I mention above, or are pursuing dramatist goals so the simplicity of the game experience is less relevant.Well, its admittedly my definition because I find it a more practical one (you can kind of point at it in work) than the one the Forge uses, and the one r.g.f.a. had was pretty vague because the number of heavy gamist participants in developing the model was very small (to the best of my knowledge, me and Gleichman).  It existed because it obviously existed (there were people who were playing with a focus on things other than story, and other than exploring the world) but there weren't many people willing to chase it farther than that, and the two of us that were were less involved than the heavy duty dramatist and simulationist groups that were predominant.  The Forge definitions are a little more specific (though I think flawed, as I've noted in my opinion about where genre emulation goes) but they also tend to be a bit more arcane.I suspect they're saying that the element is neither simulationist nor dramatist/narrativist in intent, so it must be gamist in some cases (and keep in mind, its statistically likely some people in the thread consider gamism kind of a dirty word in regard to RPGs).  That of course turns on you viewing all elements needing to fit in some incarnation of the three agendas, which I've always been agnostic about.</blockquote>

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